Ambient telephony: Designing a communication system for enhancing social presence in home mediated communication

The experience of telephonic communication in the home environment has remained very similar for decades: practical, but intrusive, and providing little experience of social presence. This paper presents the work aiming at improving the experience of social presence experience in telephony. We present the results of several user studies on telephone usage and based on these, propose the use of distributed speakerphone systems (or ambient telephones). We report empirical research comparing two different ambient telephone systems. The first system is an ambient system where the arrays of loudspeakers and microphones are embedded in the ceiling and the home audio system around the home. In the second experiment, we replaced the embedded system by a distributed set of clearly visible and tangible speakerphone units. We report lessons learned and implications for the design of ambient telephone systems.